Mr Woods told Mr Beck that he was disappointed by his meeting with senior officials at the event marking the return of the dead men's bodies.

He said that Mr Biden had acted inappropriately, asking the Woods family in a 'loud and boisterous' tone, 'Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?'

Mr Woods asked, 'Are these the words of someone who is sorry?'

A man's son is dead, and you're asking jovial questions in a "loud and boisterous" tone of voice?

Ground-Pounder: The Spectre gunship is just a killer. When it's deployed against ground troops, it just obliterates them.

The Spectre has a a single mission, and that's to pour firepower on to ground targets. It's not a fighter. It's not fast. It's not super-high-tech.

It's just heavily armored (for a plane) and heavily armed to deal death to troops on the ground.

My point here is that ground troops have two reactions to the Spectre: They either flee, or they die.

It seems very strange that these planes were not deployed to end the attack at any time during the seven hour assault.

There were also two Predator drones loitering over the battle. Were they not armed? Even if they weren't (which I doubt), we seem to have had a fair amount of intelligence during the battle.

Commenters... are objecting that we don't know the Spectre were still in Libya.

It's a fair point and I concede it. We don't know this. They may have been moved out of country by this time.

Of course that raises the next question: Why would you do that?

So we do need some questioning on this: Were there Spectres in Libya?

Spectre and Spooky, Clean Up: Andy tells me commenters are right, it's "Spectre" (British spelling) not "Specter" (American spelling), and that "Spooky" is the nickname of a Vietnam-era plane that is entirely unrelated to the Spectre. [Update - Andy: It seems they un-retired "Spooky" for a variant of the AC-130. Whatever you call it, those guys needed one.]

Corrected: Tyrone's father is named Charles Woods, not Mark, as I mistakenly believed.